Science Megathread

[Frodo]

It may soon be time to rewrite those geology textbooks:

https://twitter.com/sciam/status/1628930116892995584

[Blue3]

Getting ready for robots to make solar panels on the Moon (which would be great for any upcoming space-based solar industry, to not have to worry about the costs of launching them into space from Earth's gravity)

https://www.space.com/blue-origin-solar-cells-moon-dirt-simulant

[UWS]

Study reveals how ancient fish colonized the deep sea

The deep sea contains more than 90% of the water in our oceans, but only about a third of all fish species. Scientists have long thought the explanation for this was intuitive — shallow ocean waters are warm and full of resources, making them a prime location for new species to evolve and thrive. But a new University of Washington study led by Elizabeth Miller reports that throughout Earth’s ancient history, there were several periods of time when many fish actually favored the cold, dark, barren waters of the deep sea.

In some ways, this discovery raised more questions than it answered. What was causing fish to prefer one habitat over another? What made some fish able to move into the deep sea more easily than others? And how did these ancient shifts help create the diversity of species we have today?
When Miller mapped these flip-flopping speciation rates onto a timeline of Earth’s history, she was able to identify three major events that likely played a role.

That is interesting

[Torrain]

https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1650627421849149450

[Meclazine for Israel]

Smallest ever injectable chip tested in mice.

If I am understanding this article correctly, it can go inside you and measure temperature and wirelessly report that back to a base station.

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/smallest-ever-injectable-chip-hints-at-cybernetic-medicine


The smallest-ever computer chip resting in a hypodermic needle.
Chen Shi / Columbia Engineering

In case of a COVID-24 outbreak, it would be a great thing for delivering vaccines into the bloodstream.

The little Wi-Fi antenna could report back to a digital scanner with your vaccination status live at entry to certain establishments.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Clive Willman

Gold Fluids in Faults

https://youtu.be/KDexpMBAs6M

Got to work with this guy last year. Probably the nicest and most experienced geologist I have had the pleasure to work with. If you want to learn a little about quartz vein hosted gold, this is a great introduction.

Pure class as a person, even before becoming a scientist.

[Frodo]

Science is suggesting that birds could be making music through their bird songs (distinct from bird calls), paralleling our own.  So could our first compositions from deep prehistory be derived from birdsong?  

It Rocks in the Tree Tops, but Is That Bird Making Music?
Scientists are finding more evidence that birdsong parallels human-made music.

[Frodo]

A key ingredient for life has been found on one of Saturn's moons:

Phosphate, a key building block of life, found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus


Nasa/JPL/Space Science Institute

And they did so by exploring one of these geysers that periodically erupt from the moon's ocean underneath the ice:


Geysers on Enceladus, imaged by Cassini. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

[支持核绿派 (Greens4Nuclear)]

Re: US approves chicken made from cultivated cells, the nation’s first ‘lab-grown’ meat

https://apnews.com/article/cultivated-meat-lab-grown-cell-based-a88ab8e0241712b501aa191cdbf6b39a

For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.

The Agriculture Department gave the green light to Upside Foods and Good Meat, firms that had been racing to be the first in the U.S. to sell meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered animals — what’s now being referred to as “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat as it emerges from the laboratory and arrives on dinner plates.

The move launches a new era of meat production aimed at eliminating harm to animals and drastically reducing the environmental impacts of grazing, growing feed for animals and animal waste.

I will be curious to see how this develops. Not just because of an interview I saw from a researcher who said the tech for lab cultivated meat is nowhere near ready to be deployed at scale, but also to see whether this becomes yet another culture war flashpoint/conspiracy about how the WEF wants to ban real meat, and instead force people to eat fake meat (that turns kids gay, probably) cooked on electric stoves while trapped in 15-minute cities.

[Frodo]

The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find
Radio telescopes around the world picked up a telltale hum reverberating across the cosmos, most likely from supermassive black holes merging in the early universe.

On Wednesday evening, an international consortium of research collaborations revealed compelling evidence for the existence of a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves reverberating across the universe.

The scientists strongly suspect that these gravitational waves are the collective echo of pairs of supermassive black holes — thousands of them, some as massive as a billion suns, sitting at the hearts of ancient galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away — as they slowly merge and generate ripples in space-time.

“I like to think of it as a choir, or an orchestra,” said Xavier Siemens, a physicist at Oregon State University who is part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, collaboration, which led the effort. Each pair of supermassive black holes is generating a different note, Dr. Siemens said, “and what we’re receiving is the sum of all those signals at once.”

And here is the non-paywall version for those without a New York Times subscription.

[Benjamin Frank]

Big breaking scandal in physics:
Schrödinger's cat has been impounded by the SPCA!

 

[Frodo]

And the Euclid telescope has been lifted off into the heavens on schedule and without issues:

SpaceX rocket launches Euclid space telescope to map the 'dark universe' like never before
The European spacecraft will spend six years uncovering the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

We might have to wait a few months before this telescope can make any scientific discoveries of our cosmos.  My best guess is October this year:

Over the next four weeks, Euclid will be making its journey towards Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. Once there, it will be maneuvered into orbit around this point and mission controllers back on Earth will begin to verify the activities and functions of the spacecraft. Once the spacecraft passes all of the tests, mission control will finally turn on the scientific instruments.

Following the activation of its scientific instruments, Euclid will then undergo another two months of testing and calibrating its instruments in preparation for routine observations. The spacecraft will begin its six-year survey of one-third of the sky with "unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity."

[Blue3]

https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o

Apologies if posted before, but any thoughts on this short video on what’s been going wrong with the science (and scientists) of particle physics? I don’t like all of her videos, but this one articulates a frustration I’ve had for a while but couldn’t quite explain.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o

Apologies if posted before, but any thoughts on this short video on what’s been going wrong with the science (and scientists) of particle physics? I don’t like all of her videos, but this one articulates a frustration I’ve had for a while but couldn’t quite explain.

The huge breakthrough of the past decade was gravitational waves.

[Blue3]

https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o

Apologies if posted before, but any thoughts on this short video on what’s been going wrong with the science (and scientists) of particle physics? I don’t like all of her videos, but this one articulates a frustration I’ve had for a while but couldn’t quite explain.

The huge breakthrough of the past decade was gravitational waves.

That doesn't have anything to do with what I posted?

Gravitation waves had been predicted according to current models for decades, I think since Einstein. Same with the Higgs boson.

Many physicists think the laws of physics need to be more elegant/prettier, and coming up with all these complex theories far outside of addressing any real problem with the Standard Model and them constantly being proven wrong, instead of focusing on the real problems and questions in the Standard Model... and how sucking up all those resources and not producing results for these theories based on nothing more than making it "prettier" instead of addressing the real problems could close down funding for physics as a whole. The video helps me articulate what's been one of my own problems with how some physicists seem to approach the work, especially when I've read interviews from some supposed leading physicists in big magazines talking about theories to make it all more beautiful/elegant. The universe isn't of perfect symmetry and beauty, so not sure why so many physicists keep looking for that.

[Frodo]

A pre-Clovis site may have been found in Oregon:

Discovery: Oregon may be home to oldest human occupied site in North America

[Frodo]

There is an argument to be made that South America could have been occupied by humans as early as 27,000 years ago:

When Did Humans First Occupy the Americas? Ask the Sloth Bones.
The discovery of ancient, handcrafted ornaments revives a longstanding debate about the arrival of the earliest Americans.

(...) Over the past three decades, however, archaeological research has made it increasingly clear that the (Clovis) hunters were preceded by much earlier cultures that colonized the Americas between 24,500 and 16,000 years ago.

This week a new academic study upended even those migration timelines by proposing that what is now central-west Brazil was settled as early as 27,000 years ago, a finding that bolsters the theory that our ancestors inhabited the continent during the Pleistocene Epoch, which ended around 11,700 years ago. The period is also called the Ice Age because of its numerous cycles of glacial formation and melting.

The conclusions of the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are based on an analysis of an improbable source: three bones from an extinct giant ground sloth. Excavated 28 years ago in the Santa Elina rock shelter, the fossils — similar to the hard, scaly plates, called osteoderms, that armor the skin of present-day armadillos — showed signs of having been modified into primordial pendants, with notches and holes that researchers said could only have been created by people.

Which could only mean that they entered North America (along the Pacific coast) even earlier.  

[Meclazine for Israel]

Stephenson 2-18

https://www.facebook.com/reel/603466974852235

[Meclazine for Israel]

Kodak Detects Nuclear Explosion

https://fb.watch/lZs2AcS3lF/

[emailking]

https://youtu.be/lu4mH3Hmw2o

Apologies if posted before, but any thoughts on this short video on what’s been going wrong with the science (and scientists) of particle physics? I don’t like all of her videos, but this one articulates a frustration I’ve had for a while but couldn’t quite explain.

The huge breakthrough of the past decade was gravitational waves.

That doesn't have anything to do with what I posted?

Gravitation waves had been predicted according to current models for decades, I think since Einstein. Same with the Higgs boson.

Many physicists think the laws of physics need to be more elegant/prettier, and coming up with all these complex theories far outside of addressing any real problem with the Standard Model and them constantly being proven wrong, instead of focusing on the real problems and questions in the Standard Model... and how sucking up all those resources and not producing results for these theories based on nothing more than making it "prettier" instead of addressing the real problems could close down funding for physics as a whole. The video helps me articulate what's been one of my own problems with how some physicists seem to approach the work, especially when I've read interviews from some supposed leading physicists in big magazines talking about theories to make it all more beautiful/elegant. The universe isn't of perfect symmetry and beauty, so not sure why so many physicists keep looking for that.

There's no better way though at the moment. The standard model is what we've got to work with. We know it's not the whole story (can't incorporate gravity), but even with whatever modifications it needs it may still be largely correct, even if inelegant. It could be that we're missing something profound and there's a much better theory that's accessible if anyone finds it. There's nothing data wise that suggest that though.

[Frodo]

NASA has re-established contact with Voyager 2 (first launched in 1977), which is now way beyond our solar system:

NASA back in touch with Voyager 2 after 'interstellar shout'

[Frodo]

It is a terrifying thought thinking of Earth as a rogue planet without a host star to keep it bound.  It could have easily happened back when Jupiter was still roaming around the solar system coming ever closer to the Sun and the inner planets:

Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue
Astronomers have found that free-floating planets far outnumber those bound to a host star.

Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered to any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.

But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.

Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions. Detailed in two papers accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the researchers have deduced that these planets are six times more abundant than worlds orbiting their own suns, and they identified the second Earth-size free floater ever detected.

------------------------------------------

And to help us find even more of these rogue planets (especially those Earth-sized), NASA will soon have a new telescope to join Hubble and Webb in a few years:

NASA’s new telescope could spot thousands of exoplanets and hundreds of Earth-size rogue planets

When NASA’s next-generation space observatory launches in a few years, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will expand the search for exoplanets as well as rogue planets, or worlds that travel through space without orbiting stars.

The telescope, expected to lift off between October 2026 and May 2027, may have the potential to spot 400 such rogue planets that are similar in mass to Earth, according to new research. It’s unknown whether these planets will share any other similarities with Earth beside their mass.

Understanding these rogue planets could shed more light on the formation, evolution and disruption of planetary systems. The telescope is named in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and “mother of the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Illustration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Credit: NASA

[Frodo]

Forget the now-disproved Mt. Toba eruption 'Bottleneck' -scientists found the real one happened 900,000 years ago due to what is called the Mid-Pleistocene Transition that made ice ages longer and colder, to the detriment of our distant human ancestors:

Here's when humans nearly went extinct, reveals new study
For about 117,000 years in the past, a mere 1,280 breeding individuals supported the population.

[Frodo]

With the success of the James Webb Space Telescope and its almost-daily contribution to scientific knowledge, enter the Habitable Worlds Observatory:

Planning is underway for NASA's next big flagship space telescope

[Frodo]

A NASA Spacecraft Comes Home With an Asteroid Gift for Earth
The seven-year OSIRIS-REX mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.

A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on.

On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the muddy landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time.

The capsule’s landing is a major win for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REX, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The spacecraft set out in 2016 to retrieve material from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid about 190 feet wider than the height of the Empire State Building. Researchers hope this pristine space dirt will reveal clues about the birth of our solar system and the genesis of life on Earth.

“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REX mission, at a news conference last month.